“The gold is mine, Vagabond, not yours—dared you think otherwise?” said Dappa, translating for the Queen. Then, as an aside, he added, “She used a much more degrading term than ‘Vagabond,’ but…”
“You’re trying to spare my feelings—I understand. Tell the Queen that she stole it from us fair and square, just as we did from the Viceroy, and I’ve never imagined else-wise. Dappa, do you think she is on the rag or something?”
The Queen responded, “Then why do you try to deceive me by sailing away over the horizon on a great ship in which I have invested so much of what is mine?”
“Dappa, have you not acquainted Her Majesty with the basic principles of the ship-owning business? Do I have to explain shares? Do I have to remind her that most of the ship’s crew is to be hand-picked Malabaris? That both of her sons will be aboard? What is going on in her mind?”
“Very likely she is on the rag as you said,” Dappa responded, “and in a bit of a Mood because her boys are leaving the nest.”
The Queen said something. At the same moment she reached up with both hands and carefully removed one of the metal ornaments from her neck: a single watered-steel ring, like a dinner plate with a large hole in the center. She gripped it in one hand and curled it in towards her belly while turning sideways to Jack. Then suddenly her hand sprang outwards. The ring hissed through the air, narrowly missing Jack, and buried itself, shockingly deep, in the trunk of a tree.
“Stop talking to each other, and talk to me,” she said. Another ring came off her neck, and every man within a hundred yards cringed. She flung this one at a closer target: the line mooring her boat to the quay. It sang through the rope as easily as flying through a shaft of sunlight and vanished into the water with a sizzle. The boat began to drift downstream. Jack caught movement in the corner of his eye and turned back to look at the masts: they too had gone into ponderous movement, and were adrift in the river now—Queen Kottakkal’s first throw had cut their line.
A third ring spun out and embedded itself in the mainmast next to a coil of rope with a throwing-lead tied to its end. “Mark that rope,” said the Queen. “If you throw it to one of your friends on my boat, here, your masts are saved. If not, they drift out to sea, and all of you are my slaves to the end of your days.”
“Are you certain you translated that aright?” Jack inquired.
“I translated it perfectly,” said Dappa, gazing nervously at the departing masts.
“Have I gotten her general drift—that she wants me to swim through crocodile-infested waters to retrieve the masts?”
“The judicial machinery here is not well-developed,” Dappa announced. “There is only one sort of trial: and that is Trial by Ordeal.”
“I’m being put on trial here? For what offense?”
“For offenses you might commit in the future—which is to say that your honesty is being tried. Sometimes this might mean walking across fire. Other times, the defendant must swim through crocodiles. It is said to be an astonishing thing to watch—which may account for the custom’s perpetuation. I can supply all manner of lurid detail later, after you have survived—”
“If I survive, you mean!”
“But for now, would you please do something!?”
As the Queen had begun flinging her lethal jewelry about, half a dozen Nayars had vaulted aboard the boat and trained loaded blunderbusses upon the other members of the Cabal. They could do nothing but sit tidily on their benches, like churchgoers, and watch Jack. Looking at them Jack was struck—and not for the first time, either—by the fact that, ever since Cairo, all of them had tended to look to Jack to take action. In other lives or other circumstances they might’ve been doers of deeds and leaders of men. But put ’em all together, pose ’em a problem, and they’d all turn their eyes Jack’s way to see what he was going to do.
Which (come to think of it) had probably been noticed by Queen Kottakkal—so wise in the ways of men crowded together on armed Vessels, so backwards in her approach to judicial proceedings—and probably accounted for that it was Jack, and not van Hoek, or Moseh, who had been chosen to undergo the Trial by Ordeal.